Fraud baron forced henchmen into S&M orgies to prove loyalty – cops

Card cloner's 'bizarre initiation tests' to weed out undercover Feds

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A US card cloner forced would-be gang members to take part in group sex sessions as part of an initiation ceremony designed to weed out undercover cops, according to a detective.

Vikas Yadav - an Indian national resident in Athens, Georgia, at the time of his crimes but has since been deported - used chat rooms frequented by sadomasochists to recruit would-be cybercrooks, before staging video-taped sex sessions he participated in as both performer and producer.

"Anyone who wanted in with [Yadav] would have to have three-way sex, either with other men or women, but Vikas had to be involved and he would record it all and save the recordings so he could watch it on his big flatscreen TV,” Athens-Clarke Police Detective Beverly Russell told local paper the Athens Banner-Herald.

“This took one of the most bizarre turns in any case I’ve ever come across,” the flabbergasted cop added.

Yadav used a widescreen TV linked to home entertainment gear capable of holding 12 terabytes of data in order to review the resulting amateur grumble flicks. The fraudster turned to crime after he was kicked out of his doctoral programme at the University of Georgia’s College of Pharmacy after he was caught plagiarising back in 2005.

He started capturing PINs and card details to create counterfeit cards in order to supplement his income as a liquor store clerk. Using the cloned cards he bought high-price ticket items such as flat-screen TVs, Wiredreports.

The scam continued for about three years before a tip-off from an alert store manager led to his arrest outside a WallMart in Mississippi back in August 2008. Police subsequently arrested Yadav in his van, which was packed with luxury TVs, gaming consoles and laptops. Officers also recovered credit card forgery kit during the bust.

A subsequent search of Yadav's residence in Georgia coincided with the arrival of one of his alleged accomplices, Dwight Riddick, a former New York City police officer, with a rental van load of fraudulently bought TV sets.

Yadav was charged with credit card fraud and spent a year in prison prior to his deportation in 2010. Riddick, together with two other alleged members of Yadav's crew - Dashun McQuiller and Shaun Grittner - were convicted and sentenced last month.

Court documents don’t mention Yadav’s "bizarre initiation tests", which were reportedly related by his accomplices to Det Russell. Grittner said he wasn't subjected to the loyalty test because McQuiller had vouched for him.

Riddick was sentenced to two years of probation after he pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of stolen property. McQuiller and Grittner pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud, earning jail terms of 30 months and 10 months respectively. ®